A colleague informed me about an email notice to me regarding my preferred RSS reader Newsgator. After my gasp of dismay, I loaded the site to check my feeds and wham:

NewsGator’s Online Reader will no longer be available for consumer use as of August 31, 2009.

In conjunction with the release of our latest versions of NetNewsWire and FeedDemon which synchronize with Google Reader, NewsGator will no longer be supporting our online reader for consumer use. Paid customers who utilize the online reader or our online platform will continue to be supported.

For free versions of the latest clients, please click the appropriate link:

* NetNewsWire * FeedDemon

For detailed instructions on migrating your account to Google Reader and answers to other questions, please see our FAQ page.

Normally, I embrace change. Today, the aggravating thought of importing my 82 feeds into Google Reader, reorganizing everything, marking everything as read – again, and not doing this onerous task of my own free will just makes me unhappy.

I use Google Reader to keep my client file news monitoring activities separate from my personal/professional development and current awareness monitoring. This sounds silly, but I liked to ‘share’ my Google Reader access on rare occasions with users interested in seeing the monitored news first hand. Unlike Google Reader, when I mark a Newsgator feed Read, it no longer displays the item…keeps the news box nice and tidy. I also liked the functionality in Newsgator to create organizing folders for my feeds.

Does anyone have a suggestion for a free, functional, RSS reader other than Google? I like many baskets for my eggs.

Comments

Why not use Newsgator’s offline reader, FeedDemon? It’s free, I think; would be clearly a separate basket; and might still be able to be synced with your Newsgator feeds to mirror them.

Alternatively, if you decide on an online feed reader other than Google, you should be able to get most everything across from Newsgator by exporting an OPML file that ought to contain all your feeds and their file structure.

I like the portability of a web based reader for use on demand from wherever I happen to be (office, home, on the road with or without my laptop). Newsgator does have good product transition instructions so dealing with the transfer as in Simon’s comment will be straight forward.

As far as I can tell, you can’t share RSS feeds like you could in Newsgator… Even though you can still clip items to separate folders in FeedDemon, you can’t make them into RSS feeds like you could in NewsGator. And unless someone can tell me how to do it, I don’t think you can make multiple shared folders in Google Reader.